I’ve been trying out a new light-painting tool. It’s my home-made version of a commercially available tool. I’ve had some custom-cut Perspex shapes made, and bought a very powerful LED torch. The torch has three Cree T6 LED’s, and is somewhat north of 1000 Lumens brightness.
At present my Perspex shapes are held in place on the front of the torch with Duct tape, but I’m working on a more elegant solution. I stood in a dark room, and waved the torch around using the “Live Composite” mode on my OM-D E-M10.
I’ve got four shapes, and this image was taken using the simple rectangle. You get light diffused through the main body of the Perspex shape and a brighter light at the edges. The Perspex came with a blue protection film, and I decided to leave it on for this swirly image.
Here I stood further away and made a more complicated shape in the air, still using the rectangle shape. The purple colour is an artefact of the HDR treatment I’ve used in post-processing.
In the previous two images the torch was on full power. I discovered that when it’s turned down to a lower power it flashes. You can’t see the flashing when the torch isn’t moving, but it’s clearly visible when it’s moved. It gives this interesting sectioned look, which I am going to explore a bit more in future. This image used a triangular Perspex shape with a small piece of red film over the tip. I’ve heard that some people use sweet wrappers!
I’ve decided to call my Perspex light painting tools “DEE-lights”, because I think they will be de-lightful to work with.
I’ll keep you posted.